Quote:
Originally Posted by CWatkinsNash
Yes, as a sufficient number of people move to ebooks and stay there, that will dictate the speed of the industry transition. But I think it's sometimes too easy for those of us who have already "crossed over" to assume a certain trajectory.
And though I'm one of those who has crossed over to ebooks almost exclusively, I'm not yet feeling the same inevitability that some are feeling. In fact, I expect there will be a lot of people like xg4bx who go with ebooks for a while, then move back to mostly paper books.
I'm curious to see what the market will be down the road ten, twenty years from now for ebooks vs pbooks.
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I've been doing a lot of thinking about the overall transition, and I'm pretty sure we're still going to be seeing paper books in quantity for at least the next two or three decades.
What I do expect to see over the next decade is that ebooks will marginalize mass-market paperbacks and take over that aspect of the industry. The mass market is so inefficient, that as ebooks become more and more popular mass market paperbacks just aren't going to make financial sense to produce. Cheap "disposable" reads are going to be almost entirely electronic within 20 years, but I expect the market for trade paperbacks and hardcovers to remain fairly strong.